Is a VGG-based CNN model sometimes better for image classfication than a modern architecture?
VGG is a more basic architecture which uses no residual blocks. Reset usually perform better then VGG due to it's more layers and residual approach. Given that resnet-50 can get 99% accuracy on MNIST and 98.7% accuracy on CIFAR-10, it probably should achieve better than VGG network. Also, the validation accuracy should not be 100%. You could try increasing the size of your validation set to improve accuracy on validation. VGG network should perform worst than ResNet in most scenario, but experimenting is the way to go. Try and experiment more to get a method that works for your data. Hope that I can help you and have a nice day!